Coronary artery disease is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. The ability to better diagnose, monitor, and treat coronary artery diseases can be of life saving importance. Intravascular optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a catheter-based imaging modality that uses light to peer into coronary artery walls and generate images thereof for study. Utilizing coherent light, interferometry, and micro-optics, OCT can provide video-rate in-vivo tomography within a diseased vessel with micrometer level resolution.
Viewing subsurface structures with high resolution using fiber-optic probes makes OCT especially useful for minimally invasive imaging of internal tissues and organs. This level of detail made possible with OCT allows a clinician to diagnose as well as monitor the progression of coronary artery disease. OCT images provide high-resolution visualization of coronary artery morphology and can be used alone or in combination with other information such as angiography data and other sources of subject data to aid in diagnosis and planning such as stent delivery planning. In addition to OCT, various optical, acoustic, and other intravascular data collection proves can be used.
Imaging portions of a patient's artery provides a useful diagnostic tool for doctors and others. OCT, ultrasound and other data collection modalities use guide catheters to position a probe in a blood vessel prior to collecting data. One or more guidewires can be used to navigate the tortuous path through the arteries to arrive at a location of interest for data collection. Unfortunately, a guidewire can generate shadows during the process of probe-based data collection. These shadows can negatively affect the imaging of stents and other arterial elements. Accordingly, a need therefore exists to detect the location of a guidewire and develop methods of representing it and using it to inform the detection of other intravascular elements. The present disclosure addresses this need and others.